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Topic: Farewell BTRL (Read 428252 times)

As you know, the BTRL project has been on Game-Warden for many years. It was the second major project for GW to host after SoL, and it helped put this place on the map. We had a great many good times here throughout the season debuts of the show Battlestar Galactica, discussing and speculating etc. We also had a great time playing with the released demo and discussing further future modifications. Lots of work and care was put into this TC, and many good things became of it.

As you may know shortly after the demo was released there was a fallout between some members of the team. This instigated a split amongst the team members due to certain differences. Although I will not get into specifics, another project was spawned (I will get to that later) and BTRL lost most of its staff, with the exception of some of its original members.

After this split, BTRL was no longer the same project that it used to be. The BTRL leadership then felt it very necessary to be very protective of their forum. Unfortunately I was doing some RL stuff while this was going on and I was not able to address this problem. Some things happened during this period of time that were regrettable. Posts and threads were deleted with no explanation, completely miffing their fans. While they had their reasons for doing this, I want to make it clear that I did not approve of this censorship and if I would have been around I would not have allowed it.

Inactivity combined with this seemingly hostile stance toward their fans was the beginning of the end for BTRL existing here. When I came back a few weeks ago I began to access the situation and try and salvage something for the sake of their fans. While this may have caused some strife for our users and our staff alike, i felt it necessary to attempt to reconcile differences. This failed, and we were in a difficult situation.

Now, unfortunately, it has now been mutually agreed between the GW Administration and the remaining members of BTRL that their continued existence here is neither profitable nor desirable for both parties. Continued existence here would only be marred by more strife and arguments, neither of which I have the stress capacity to deal with anymore.

This will put to close a very vibrant and interesting chapter in GW history.

Now about all of these posts that were allegedly deleted in the last 2 days: nothing has been permanently deleted. We will be making all public posts visible soon. We cannot do this instantly because everything got dumped into one hidden forum (long story), but they will be reappearing as soon as the admins get some spare time to go through them and move them so the public can see them.

If you have any concerns, regrets, parting statements, and/or fun times to share feel free to voice them in this forum. Just keep them civil. I know there are quite a few people that had bad blood with the old staff, but please refrain from taunting or flame baiting. It is over now, so there is no sense in these activities.

Now, some words about the future:You should go visit Dispora, the other fork that came from BTRL. Its team contains mostly ex BTRL members. I doubt that they would have any interest in coming back here after what has happened but if you liked BTRL you should definitely check out and throw your support behind this project. They are working on another, independent Freespace 2 BSG TC that looks very interesting.

As for Anecdotes....Well, BtRL will always have a special place in my games collection simply because it was the game that served as an entry point into the FS community for me. There I was, back in 2007, looking for a BSG Game for the PC. Lo and behold, there was BtRL. Played it, had fun with it, and got curious. It said that it was based on FreeSpace, a game I fondly remembered from back when it was new. So I went on a hunt to reacquire FS, get FSOpen going, and, well. 2 years later, I'm still here playing it.

Fair enough Omniscaper wanted to focus on the final release after the demo and I can respect that but it doesn't take much effort to release some information now and again on something you're working on especially when it has drawn so much attention. This amount of interest in BtRL I found it increasingly odd that it was shunned when I thought it would add some pride to the developers and that they'd take some satisfaction in receiving it.

All I can say now is I hope it will still continue to be developed so that we have two BSG mods to look forward to in the future, both with their own unique content.